#because he isnt! he really doesnt get violent often! its just something thats instinctive for him

[repeatdeath]

I HAVE SO MUCH TO SAY BUT NEVER KNOW HOW TO PUT IT INTO WORDS!!!!!!!!!!!! THIS PROBABLY SUCKS TO READ. but again plssss hear me out. talking more about hydes impulsiveness cuz its not just 'murder kill drugs violent kill sex murder'

im not a doctor in any way but i do wanna say that impulsive thoughts do have some reasoning for being there, though it may be extremely stupid and dangerous. ((btw im not talking about what causes the lack of self control, im talking about why the impulsive thoughts are that thought.)) most impulses come from either the seeking of some feeling (most often hysteria, thrill, or humor) or experiencing things you havent (such as what does this feel like? what happens to me if i do this? you may already know by common sense, but the curiosity isnt calmed by that) but other impulses like stealing not only come from the possible thrill, but the reward of it. the entire reason stealing is such a strong and common impulse is because you know the item youre stealing has some value to you, its instinct to take what can benefit you. even when blurting random shit out, theres a reason your brain thought of it in the first place. but most of the time impulsive thoughts are from craving thrill or curiosity. !!!importantly: what the brain perceives as having somee sort of reaction depends on how disordered and nurtured the mind is. its unique per person

this is not only why hydes impulses arent the same 4 things over and over, but why a lot of impulses are really strange and unusual. because of jekylls stress of maintaining an extremely respectable and gold hearted genius rep. and the amount of hours he spends working on this, it makes sense for his and therefore hydes impulses and desires to be the opposite, something risky and dangerous and frowned upon. to get some form of euphoria or freedom he typically doesnt get but craves ohhhh he craves it so bad. but this can be literally anything, not just violence and drugs. it can range from physical or psychological self harm to breaking furniture to eating unsanitary and inedible things to mocking people to literallylyly anythinggg!!!!

this man is not only here to have sex and do 1886 drugs he is here to be everything jekyll wants to be but cannot without serious backlash and consequence!!! he is the traumatized animal instincts of the mind!!! do not limit this man to 4 actions. edward hyde does stupid shit like throw glass at birds and then eats the bird and also the glass bcs fuck you and also im hungry!!!!1 he pisses in peoples drinks probably in front of them cuz thats rlly fucking funny!!! Love The Guy.

[theregoesmylurkerstatus]

Caleb has, verbally, shown so little bloodthirst regarding the people who wronged him. He doesn’t know how he feels. He doesn’t know what he wants. He wants them to change, he wants the pain to stop. He wants to rehabilitate all these murderers under Ikithon because he was one of them and he wants to believe he’s not alone in this, he wants them to get better.

He also takes three steps into the place where he was sealed away like some kind of animal, full of simple (if skilled) guards who are so much lower on the food chain than the assassins Caleb knows... and for the first time ever he starts crushing people to death. Gone is the soft talk and hesitant hope. He asserts that they knew what they were doing. That they were not innocents.

He spent eleven years there. He can’t remember it. He also can’t think of the people who did that to him as people, whether they were actually the ones that guarded him or not.

I think Caleb’s trauma and his ability to react with extreme prejudice when confronted with it often gets underestimated both by the audience and Caleb himself. There’s a really interesting dichotomy that seems to go on with him, in that we’re constantly taken somewhat aback by these breathtaking displays of violence of his, even though they keep happening.

I realised it when we first met Astrid, actually. I don't know about anyone else, but the revelation that Caleb’s reaction to watching his parents die wasn’t running in to help them, or screaming himself, or even dissociating, but was instead attacking his peers? It surprised the heck out of me.

I don’t think anyone thought that would have been his reaction. All the pieces of fiction or art or meta about that moment that I saw assumed he had a much more passive or help oriented reaction. Even the cast themselves animated that moment as Astrid and Eodwulf stoically walking away from a silent Caleb on his knees in their own animated title sequence.

The fact that we all accepted the image of Caleb, on his knees, silently watching his family burn, is interesting to me. Because I do get why.

When Caleb is forcefully reminded of that moment of extreme grief, he dissociates. He doesn’t react violently when lost in his trauma in that particular way. Add to that that Caleb brushes over the immediate aftermath of his parent’s deaths, which makes it seem like his foggy, clouded state in the Asylum was the instant result of his trauma, and the idea that Caleb reacted passively to his parent’s deaths is a very easy assumption to make.

At this point I believe it’s also indicative of how Caleb sees himself. Caleb hates (hated?) himself, yes, but he doesn’t actually seem to see himself as a violent person. When asked to impress a high level mage from an alien culture, he chose the versatile reskinned Bigby’s Hand, Cat’s Ire. When trying to be intimidating, he uses his words, or points to his friends as threats, or uses Frumpkin as a prop.

He doesn’t seem to give his ease with violence much thought or weight in his own view of himself. I think he assumed he was passive during his years at the Sanitarium, and so therefore assumed that his “breaking” was similar. And if that’s what Caleb thought of himself, why would we think any different?

People don’t tend to think of Caleb as a fighter, least of all Caleb himself. The common view of him is that he’s a hesitant support character. He’s not someone who fans or other characters alike would easily call “bloodthirsty,” especially with him confronting and discussing the man who ruined his life and refusing to commit to killing him.

Everything about how Caleb verbally approaches these traumas shows that he’s not vengeance driven. Revenge has never been part of his game plan, never been something he cared enough to pursue. And because of that palpable lack of bloodthirsty vengeance, because of his soft spoken, cautious demeanor, Caleb is not someone who would generally be picked as having extreme, unrelenting violence as his knee-jerk reaction.

Except that’s exactly what Caleb does when backed into a corner. That’s like his biggest move. Wall of Fire and Fireballing Avantika and her crew on a hair trigger? Bleeding, on the verge of unconsciousness, out of spells, and still managing to deal the killing blow on Lorenzo because he chose violence over any other action? Opening the final fight against Obann by smashing through the window and burning half the cultists to death, because they were that desperate to get Yasha back after two failed attempts?

He woke up after eleven years of being addled, confused and not himself, and immediately killed a guard and broke out of the Assembly’s own Saitarium in the heart of Rexxentrum. He unexpectedly got stabbed by a full-fledged Scourger, and his instant reaction was to beat her over the head with a rock. 

And now, he’s infiltrated that same Sanitarium where he was kept only to flip from his desire to redeem those under the Assembly’s thumb to murdering half the people he came across in there with extreme prejudice.

His lack of interest in long-term vengeance is interestingly balanced by his frequent choices to pursue short-term retribution. It’s both his way of protecting his friends and himself, removing the threat and discouraging other threats, but it’s also, in my view, frequently an outlet for his heavily suppressed anger at the people who hurt him and his friends.

Caleb can be a good diplomat, but Caleb rarely chooses to be a diplomat. Caleb can be charming, but Caleb doesn’t like being charming. Caleb can be a good support caster, and Caleb is a support caster! But when he’s too compromised for strategy, when he stops thinking, he starts burning everything in his way. Because Caleb? He likes the way fire feels.

Caleb spent his formative years training to respond to conflict, physical or political, with lethality, and on a much more fundamental level, he is and always has been a man of action. 

He took action to get out of the Sanitarium as soon as he was capable. He took action in the Bright Queen’s throne room, made a risky ploy instead of letting them be arrested. He wanted to take action retroactively against his parent’s deaths the second he regained coherency.

Despite what we all assumed, doing nothing in the face of his parent’s deaths was never an option for Caleb, and he wasn’t taught anything that was going to help his parents once the house was on fire and the screams started. So what else was he going to do, after two years of growing into the Scourger mould? When he loses his mind, his ability to think, two of his reasons to care?

Of course it was violence. Of course it was lashing out at the people he must have thought, on some level, as being in his way. Of course it was fire. What else would it be?

And though these circumstances here aren’t the same... there are enough similarities. He’s once again in those familiar halls (in that familiar mindset) where he was treated as a weapon, nothing more. He’s with the people he loves and he knows they’re in danger, again. In fact, they’re in danger from the same people he spent eleven years feeling threatened by, that he viewed as obstacles, whether consciously or not.

He doesn’t want his loved ones to be in danger. He doesn’t want to be surrounded by the guards who he associates with his own helplessness. He especially doesn’t want those two things to go together. And he has never been able to sit idly by when he can act. But what kind of actions can he take? What can he do to get these guards away, away from him, away from his friends, out of his way, right now?

The tried and true method. Not burning, not here, not now, let’s not set a building on fire with his loved ones in it again (though it happened anyway). But no matter. He’s learned a lot of tricks in the last few months.

And hey, don’t worry, Caleb’s not angry. He’s not still working through his own pain and rage at these people. He really does want to heal, not hurt.

It’s just that these ones deserved it.

[wee-chlo]

I know it seems like RDR1 negates the sacrifices of RDR2 so here’s a happy thought.

Jack, sad and depressed and bitter and alone in the run-down ruin of Beecher’s Hope, finding the journal Arthur and John ended up sharing. Reading it. He doesn’t remember much of what they talk about, he was only four, but there are very faint memories of moving a lot. Names that seem vaguely familiar.

It becomes a bit of an obsession with him. Like vengeance but a little lighter, a little more hopeful. He transcribes everything in the journal because the thing’s falling a part a fair bit, and then starts trying to figure out who these people are.

One thing leads to another and suddenly he’s running around to Valentine and Strawberry and Blackwater and Saint Denis, or the places that hold the historical archives of those towns. He’s pawing through paperwork and going through slides of newspapers finding scraps about the Van Der Linde Gang. 

He finds out where Mary-Beth is first, since she’s a writer with a mailbox for fan letters and official correspondence. He writes her a letter that he’s rewritten a hundred times or more and gets one back within a week bubbling with joy and excitement and inviting him to meet her. He gets a haircut, shaves, takes a bath. He didn’t do any of those things much before but recently he’s found it’s easier to get into places if you don’t look like a deranged hobo.

Mary-Beth is beautiful and elegant and kind and has an excellent memory. She tells him about Arthur and John and Dutch and the gang. She remembers Kieran fondly and Lenny and Hosea with grief and love and Micah with disdain. She tells him about Miss Grimshaw and Pearson and Karen and Javier and Bill. She directs him to Tilly, who she keeps in touch with.

Tilly is older now, but still kind and understanding and with no patience for nonsense. She’s married to a good man with two children who scurry underfoot as she and Jack talk about the gang. He’s taking notes. He’s always taking notes. Sometimes he forgets, he’s so engrossed in what she’s saying, but she’s good about gently reminding him to. She directs him to Reverend Swanson.

The Reverend’s the easiest to find but maybe the hardest to get a hold of, being a respected reverend with a large congregation, but when Jack sheepishly approaches him after a sermon, he enthusiastically ushers the young man into his office. Swanson wasn’t young during the heyday of the gang and he’s old now, his red hair and mustache grayed out and joints achy enough to need the support of a cane but he’s still remarkably sharp.

Reverend Swanson and Jack talk for a very long time about more than just the gang. Jack didn’t tell Mary-Beth or Tilly about Ross and the riverbank. He told them about Uncle and Abigail and John but not Ross. Not Ricketts or the family he left as broken as his own out of spite. He tells Reverend Swanson though. And Reverend Swanson takes the same stories that Tilly and Mary-Beth told, the ones that Abigail and John were too heartbroken or angry about to tell, and turns them into words of encouragement. Faith. Hope. How men with violent pasts can move past them, live good lives, redeem themselves, live and die with honor and dignity. He recites a piece of scripture he would say often to the gang, eyes a little soft with memory and sadness and wistfulness. 

“They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings of eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint.”

Will you read me that passage Reverend Swanson used to read? You remember that?

Jack Marston did a lot of things after his father died, and a lot of things after his mother died, but he never cried. He’d had to be strong for his mother, so he’d grit his teeth and blinked past them and by the time she’d died and he’d buried her next to John on the hill above Beecher’s Hope, they’d all fossilized in his chest, locked at the base of his throat like a scream. 

Here, though, he feels something snap like a wishbone in his chest, and they just spill out.

“Jack?” Reverend Swanson asks gently.

“I couldn’t remember it,” Jack says. “M-Mama asked me to read that and I... I couldn’t remember.”

That’s not quite it but it’s close enough. Reverend Swanson seems to have some experience with men like Jack. He smiles and nods and reaches over and takes Jack’s hand in his and lets him weep.

Charles is harder to find, in a reservation far up north in the Canadian Yukon. People there aren’t terribly interested in telling him where Charles lives and don’t really seem to buy that he’s an old friend, so he just asks them to let Charles know where he’s staying. 

Charles finds him a day later, still a bear of a man, still surrounded by this air of silent, simple serenity. Jack wonders if he’ll ever be able to do that. He doubts it.

Charles speaks softly and simply. He doesn’t gush the way Mary-Beth did or meander the way the Reverend did. He doesn’t beat around the bush or shy away from harsher memories. The treatment of the Wapiti tribe is still a bitter thing, something sharp around the edges that Jack hesitates to press, but he offers details the others didn’t have. He was a rider when the others were at camp. 

Like with Reverend Swanson, Jack feels an instinctive need to speak. To tell Charles things he didn’t tell the others out of shame or fear or a desperate need to forget. Maybe because Charles offers details like that of his own, things that he clearly doesn’t enjoy talking about but because it’s Jack...

“I killed Edgar Ross,” Jack says quietly when Charles mentions Hosea. Charles pauses.

“Why?” He asks, and that brings Jack up short.

“Because... because he killed my pa!” he stammers. “He hunted us down and, and...” Bile rises in his throat, that old scream that he didn’t let out, the smell of blood and his mother’s sobs and the screams of horses and guns and...

“Is it over now?” Charles asks, cutting off his thoughts easily. Jack doesn’t know what to say. Charles smiles slightly, sadly. “Let it be over now. It’s what they wanted for you.” 

Jack feels tears tearing at him again but this time he fights them back.

“You deserved better,” he says, his throat tightening and betraying everything he’s trying to hide. “You all deserved better.”

And he finds that he isn’t just talking about the Van Der Linde Gang,  who all died somehow, either grandly or softly or in some small, dark way that left them waking up at night in a cold sweat. He’s talking about the Wapiti Tribe, and Eagle Flies, and Rains Fall. He’s talking about Beau Gray and Penelope Braithwaite. He’s talking about those legendary gunslingers who lived on the run or died in the dirt. He’s talking about Lyndon Monroe and Thomas Downs and Luisa Fortuna and Nastas and everyone but himself, who was too stupid to let things go, too stupid to do what his mother begged him to on her deathbed and just find a quiet place to live and grow old and die.

“Maybe,” Charles agreed, standing and holding out a hand for Jack to shake. “Too late for that, though. Better to keep going.”

[conflictcrafter]

The Humanity of Lord of War

when you make an artwork, you have to figure out your role. being the maker of something is the surface role. and it is necessary. the next step is to pick a shovel and dig. or mine.

we do not determine roles for the heck of it. we do it because it is both the goal and the core. the goal, the core, and the means should align. and when things are in order, beauty emerges, organically, even when the surface looks chaotic.

I.

Andrew Niccol knew what his roles are in Lord of War. one of them is to explore an inquiry: what does it mean to be human?

this question has been explored in many punk films. Ridley Scott and Philip K Dick's Blade Runner films comes to mind. George Miller has also examined the question specially well in the recent Mad Max: Fury Road. these films put humanity in future punks, in a certain point in post-humanity, to hammer the question down.

Lord of War doesnt play with punks (we can call it presentpunk though). the historical events and the political conditions depicted in the film still ring bells. theoretically, the question is easier to grasp since it's set categorically in the present. this film, again, is not a punk where this question of humanity is often explored. but this is why literature or film is so beautiful: narrative elements, in this case the setting, bare different ways to answer the same query. also, familiar settings may bring out the most outlandish of answers.

What does it mean to be human 1: Beware of The Dog

Yuri (Nick Cage), after making his first gun trade, approaches his younger brother Vitaly (Jared Leto) who cooks in their Jewish family restaurant. while Yuri convinces Vi to be his gun trade partner, Yuri notices a poster in the kitchen that says: Beware of The Dog. "We dont have a dog (also why you put that in the kitchen?)," said Yuri. to which Vi responded:

"To remind myself to beware of the dog in me. The dog in me who wants to fuck everything that moves, fight and kill weaker dogs. I guess it's a . . . to remind me to be more human."

halfway through the film, Vi succumbs into cocaine addiction due to Yuri's involvement in his life. it was as though the film was telling us that Vi is indeed a dog. running and fucking around.

but when Vi finally met "a girlfriend," he changes and leaves the cocaine. Yuri comes back into his life and convinces him again to be his partner. in a deal in Sierra Leone, Vi, now sober, witnessed the bloody effects of illegal gun trade to African civilians. 

in an effort to sabotage the deal and potentially save innocent people, Vi is able to blow half of the arms and is consequently killed by the warlords.

Vi dies a martyr. loyal dogs die as martyrs. martyrs transcend humanity.

What does it mean to be human 2: I Won’t Fail as a Human Being

Yuri returns home to his wife Ava Fontaine (Bridget Moynahan) who now knows about her husband's illegal gunrunning business.

Ava is informed by idealistic Interpol agent Jack Valentine (Ethan Hawke) of her husband's illegal arms activities. he reminds Ava that her parents were gunned by people who got their guns illegally from arms dealers like Yuri.

later that evening, Yuri comes home to a naked wife, unable to wear her silk sleeping dress, unable to lie on their bed, because to her, "Everything’s got blood on it."

she confronted Yuri and he finally confessed to his wife his real occupation. she tells Yuri to stop it since they have enough. but Yuri said he couldnt just quit because it isnt about the money. it is what he is good at.

Ava tells her husband that she "is a failed actress, a failed artist. But she doesnt fail to be human."

while Yuri feels that being human means getting one's dreams, having a lucrative lifestyle, proving to other humans that one is the best; for Ava though, humanity is as simple as not inflicting harm to other human beings.

What does it mean to be human 3: The Reptile Tail

after being confronted by Ava and Vi, Yuri finally decides to go legit. suddenly, he is not an arms dealer anymore, and he got agents confused.

this is the part of the film that youd wish the main character has truly changed, with all the things and relationships he has at stake, youd want the main character to change. Niccol teases us that, that narrative relief. but if you know how plot works, you know Yuri hasnt reached that ultimate fall.

so after going legit, he is pulled back into the arms dealing business by the self-proclaimed president of Liberia, Andre Baptise.

you would want to feel that Yuri would be doing it forcibly in fear for his family's safety. but no. when the scene with him and the Andre cuts, we hear Yuri:

"At four and a half months old, a human fetus has a reptile's tail—a remnant of our evolution. Maybe that is why I could't escape. You can fight a lot of enemies and survive. But if you fight your biology, you will always lose."

Yuri's biological mumbling here is based on the evolutionary development studies of Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) which theorizes that embryonic stages of development reflect the previous adult evolutionary forms of the specie (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny).

Yuri is basically saying that since humans were previously non-humans, reflected by having actual tails while developing in the womb, humans will always go back in to behaving as animals. and that we can never fight it.

Yuri is wrong. for starters, Haeckel's hypothesis, the Recapitulation Theory, is long defunct.

while embryos have "tails," this does not represent the evolutionary process of a specie.

we don't have embryonic tails because thats how we evolved. we just had tails. that's just it.

thus, we are not echoes of a long evolution of reptiles. and what Yuri is telling himself is merely a rationalization defense mechanism to justify his illegal arms dealing.

and it's completely human to rationalize immoral behavior.

in insisting biology and in exercising rationalization, Yuri has perfectly demonstrated the frailty of human beings: giving intellectual justifications to humans' animalistic tendencies. Yuri has satisfied the id in booming his ego.

but being human isnt only about rationalizing.

being human also means thinking about the welfare of other human beings.

Yuri has become, if not the best, one of the bests in illegal arms dealing. in essence, he has become a superpower in the trade. but Yuri, in Nietzsche's eyes is far from being an Ubermensch.

in Kant's eyes, Yuri has trampled the categorical imperative.

in our eyes, Yuri is not a hero.

and this is what makes him human: his acceptance of life's dramatic irony. he knows, he sees, he "appreciates" the negative implications of what he does, and what's coming. yet he still does it. he is helplessly and happily trapped like all of us.

II.

although we follow closely the life of Yuri, in a "story" perspective, it's Vitaly that ultimately follows the heroic arc. Vitaly is the proxy hero to Yuri, Yuri doesnt undergo metamorphosis. but Vitaly does.

hence the film is a character study of how a human being can become a monster: by allowing and being part of something that is systematically bad and irreversible.

Niccol illustrates the monstrosity of Yuri not by making the character violent. he ingeniously does it by portraying Yuri as a kind and generous person who often describes and treats the people who are really close to him well. he, in his monologues, talks a great deal about them in good terms. yet he never talks about himself in such way. in fact, he never talks about himself at all.

and this where NIccol's genius comes: he makes Yuri seamlessly not talk about himself because in truth, Yuri hates himself. and a monster is a monster is he hates himself.

in the end, nothing is solved. what wins is the human basal instinct to harm others and at the same time, be detached from it. more than a narrative work, the film is a challenge:

how much humanity are we willing to let go to feel human?

III.

the film has managed to be an artwork that also talks about important world issues. and if there is something that an artist should takeaway from the viewing, it should be seeing how art and function can go together neatly.

the only failure of the film, albeit minor, is despite the great research that the creative production team has gone through to parallel real events, it fell short in interpreting Interpol's function properly. Interpol doesnt at all conduct arrests.

aside from that, Lord of War is a solid 9/10 for its take on the question of humanity.

_____ non-film image sources in order of appearance:  1. https://image.slidesharecdn.com/defensemechanism-160520104849/95/defense-mechanism-40-638.jpg?cb=1463741864

2. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/30/22/3b/30223b65bc57c735199209472b57c0b3.jpg 

3. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/c0/16/e2/c016e21b69049ab2c7a02caa1bd9e24d.jpg